New broadband service in Ireland launched by Imagine

A brand new wireless broadband service that will be based on WiMAX technology has now been launched in Ireland by Imagine communications, and communities are being asked to contact the provider is they wish to use the new service.

Sean Bolger, the chief executive of Imagine has promised that this service will be around 50 percent cheaper than any comparable product from Eircom, although no specific pricing for the service has been issued by the provider. This new service will offer users connection speeds of up to 7Mbps, which is twice the speed of most domestic services that are available at the moment, and is backed by an investment of €100 million.

By the end of 2012 the service should be available to 90 percent of the country according to Mr Bolger who said “That’s an estimate of the number of base stations we can deploy but we can economically afford to go into much smaller areas than can be served by [fixed line] DSL.”

In rural areas coverage in an 8km radius can be achieved by each WiMAX base station and because of this, he said, the least populated rural areas would not become the 10 per cent of the State not covered. WiMAX has been designed to become a replacement for fixed-line connection unlike mobile broadband said Mr Bolger.

Although there are currently no negotiations taking place Imagine has said that it intends to allow other network operators full wholesale access to its WiMAX services.

The adoption of WiMAX technology has been quite a slow process with the technology, which has often been referred to as ‘4G’ or fourth generation wireless technology, having been proposed back in 2001. The global head of WiMAX at Intel, Kevin Jones advised that WiMAX delivers excellent value although he admitted that rollouts of the technology had been delayed by the “challenging macro-economic environment”

Source – Irish Times